Across the Waters of Time- Pliny Remembered

by Ken Parejko

  But I was fed up with this human need to capture and control the wild. The poor bird spent its life in a cage. Like the lion, lovely as it was it was a mere body in a cage, like a waxen image of the emperor.

  “Would you let him go, as a favor?” I asked her once, as we sat after lunch watching it in its cage.

  “Release Horus? But why?” She’d already explained that he was called Horus because he was her parhedros, her spiritual assistant, who would help lead her soul to the abode of the gods. It seemed a lot of mumbo-jumbo to me. I saw no parhedros. That was all in her imagination. I saw only a lovely bird, straining to be free.

  “If you keep him in the cage, he'll die,” I objected.

  “Don’t be silly. I’ve had him nearly a year. He won’t die, at least not without my permission.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “He wants to be free,” I said. It seemed so obvious.

  “He wants to be with me.”

  “Are you saying he stays with you of his own free will?”

  “Of course. We found each other in Alexandria, in a market. He was waiting there for me. We have an understanding. I force him to do nothing,” she answered.

  “He chooses to live in the cage and wear that hood?”

  “Of course.”

  I didn’t believe a word of it. In the animal’s eyes I didn’t see one iota of acquiescence, only a fierce abiding animosity. Clearly she didn’t see the same world I saw. I found myself plotting a rebellion, to release the bird in spite of her.

  Though on the Cape we were blessed with a cooling breeze, it was a hot summer afternoon. I was in my study, jotting in my journal an idea I'd had about the distribution of species. Plants, I wrote, are living things which are rooted to their surroundings. Like people, and like this feathered creature Drusilla brought into our lives, all living things can be described as much through their history and relationships as through their momentary form. I rested my writing hand for a moment and stared out the window, allowed the breeze to carry me away, dissolve me, allowed myself to be rebuilt by the history of my own relationships and experiences, from Como to Rome, Vetera, Syria, Judea, Spain and Cyrenaica, Belgium and all the other places I’d been. How was I the same through all this? How had each experience changed me?

  She entered the room from behind, unseen and unheard. As I allowed the great sweep of personal history to reconstruct myself, she placed a hand lightly on my shoulder, startling me. I looked up. She smiled.

  She moved alongside me and picked up a papyrus which lay on the table. I’d been rearranging the library the past few days. Several papyrus rolls remained unshelved. She unrolled the book in her hand, and slowly read the Greek:

  From planet to planet we fall,

  crying for home in the abyss--

  we are your tears, Dionysos.

  Mighty one! God of Freedom!

  Bring your children back into

  your heart of singing light.

  She unrolled the papyrus further, reading aloud:

  To the left of the house of Hades

  under a graceful white cypress

  a well offers spring water.

  Don’t drink there.

  Find the well by the lake of memory.

  Guardians protect the cold water.

  Tell them:

  I am a child of earth

  and of starry heaven,

  but my race is of heaven.

  This you know.

  I am parched

  and perishing.

  Give me cold water

  from the lake of memory.

  They will give you water

  from the sacred spring

  and you will live

  a lord among heroes.

  “Why,” she said, “its the Orphic Hymns. Where did you get these?”

  I rose to stretch my legs, cramped from sitting so long. I poured a glass of water. “Alexandria. A little shop in the Egyptian quarters.”

  “It’s a really old copy,” she said. “I’ve never seen quite this version before. What do you know about them?”

  “The Orphic hymns? Very little.” But the mention of their name stirred a faint echo of my dream, long ago, and Drusus' warning to pay them heed.

  “They’re to help us escape the wheel of reincarnation,” she said. “They’re scratched onto tablets of gold and placed with the body as passwords into Elysium. Why would someone write them onto papyrus?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps so they wouldn’t be lost.”

  She stepped closer to the window to catch more of the afternoon light. She read several of the hymns quietly, to herself. “Yes, they’re here, one after another. You know, Felix was afraid of dying, so I promised I’d put them in his tomb.”

  “And did you?”

  “Did I what?” she was distracted by the papyrus.

  “Provide them for him, in his tomb?”

  She turned the papyrus and peered closely at it. “Look, there’s something scribbled here, underneath.”

  I set my glass down and came beside her, looked over her shoulder. I squinted. My eyes weren’t so good anymore.

  “See,” she said, running her hand up and down the page. “Crosswise to the hymns, partly washed out, don’t you see it?”

  Now that she’d pointed it out, I did. There was a sub-text in tiny Greek cursive running perpendicular to the darker, larger uncials of the hymns. “Why,” I said in surprise, “it’s a palimpsest.”

  When parchment and papyrus were in short supply a text was often washed out and written over. Such palimpsests were common. Because the sub-text sometimes made the over-text harder to read, they were usually cheaper and inferior to virgin papyrus. We held the roll open, bent toward the window. Now we could see that the sub-text filled the entire roll, now and then fading into illegibility only to rise to view again.

  Lucius came in to announce dinner. Lucius, come here,” I said. “See, it’s the Orphic Hymns we found in Alexandria. They’re a palimpsest.”

  Lucius peered down at the rolls. His eyes were no better than mine. But he remembered seeing something under the writing when we’d first found the book, years before. He reminded me of that, and once again reminded me that it was time for dinner. Drusilla’s presence put him off. He’d come to resent the woman, the way she intruded into my life. Though it wasn’t his place, he’d been on the edge more than once already of warning me against her. Besides, we'd been sharing a bed, and in his new-found religion that was a sin. He turned and left us to ourselves.

  “Can you read it?” I asked her. “Wait!”

  I rummaged around under a pile of leaves and came up with my reading lens.

  Placing the lens close to some of the darker subtext, I read aloud to her, from the Greek:

  “...the plant is widely found in Libya...” I raised the lens off the papyrus, my heart racing, then went back to the page. “…But most commonly near the Syrtis starting at the Isles of the Eusperides...”

  “Why, I believe it’s about silphium!”

  “Silphium?”

  “The laser plant, from which real laser used to be made. It was the only thing that really helped my breathing. I have a few plants struggling to stay alive out back. I think its extinct in the wild, though Aristotle claimed there were fields of it far back in the mountains of Cyrenaica. If there are it would be a great boon to mankind to find them. I’ve been searching for years for a lost text of Aristotle, in which he's supposed to have described where to find silphium.”

  I moved over to my desk, lay the papyrus down carefully and sat. Whose writing was this? I knew Theophrastus like I knew the back of my own hand. No, not Theophrastus. The plant described, it could be silphium. The geography was right.

  “And this may be it,” I said. “By Hercules, this may be it.”

  But most of the text was illegible, overwritten, washed-out or faded. Only here and there were bits and pieces still readable. Silently I cursed the scribe
s who'd overwritten the Orphic poems onto this treasure.

  I could feel my lungs tightening, and began to cough. I spoke through a wheezing breath, my voice strained and weak. “It could be Aristotle. It just could be. See, it’s very old, boustrophedon, written left to right, right to left and back and forth like an ox plowing a field.” Could it really be Aristotle? I paused, breathed deeply. “Only it’s too damned faded to make any sense of,” I said in exasperation. I threw down the lens, which skidded across the table-top and was only prevented from falling onto the floor by its collision with a heavy seashell.

  She picked up the papyrus and stared down at the faint lines of text. “The light’s already fading. We can look at it tomorrow.”

  “But I’m taking you to Cumae in the morning.”

  “Then when I get back. It will be an adventure. We can decipher it together. Now didn’t that man-servant of yours,” Drusilla treated Lucius as coldly as he treated her. She had never seen a servant treat his master as such an equal, and vice versa. “Didn’t he say something about dinner?”

  After dinner we went back to the beach. We stood to watch the sun go down, then the moon come out from behind the high ridge of the Cape behind us and slide slowly westward. It grew dark,and the business of the harbor behind us and its fleet quieted. We sat in the sand, slapping at gnats and flies. To the east I could see the star called the Vintager rising, which marked the time of the year for the beginning of the grape harvest. I remembered years ago seeing the Vintager from Fredericus’ villa far up along the Rhine. It seemed more than a long lifetime ago, yet to the stars in their easy swing through the sky it must have been but an instant.

  We decided to swim to cool off and escape the bugs We undressed and walked into the water, which lapped at our feet, then circled our knees. We splashed out to where it was deeper, then slipped down into the water. I loved to swim. When I was unable to sleep I would sometimes make my way here and slip into the water alone. The men of the fleet had grown accustomed to seeing my big ivory body bobbing up and down out in the moonlit water like an oversized, bloated jellyfish.

  Except for the two of us the beach was deserted. Drusilla stood in waist-deep water and shook her hair and laughed while I floated nearby watching her. The moonlight cast her body in a cool white glow and as she stood staring up into the sky she seemed almost made of whitest Pentelic marble, a lovely Praxiteles or Phidias, an Aphrodite rising out of the sea. Then she bent to splash water over her breasts and the spell was broken. I lay back in the soothing water, breathing easily, the moon to one side and her on the other. A light breeze flawed the sea, which bore sheets of shimmering diamonds on its surface. Her body was smooth and white as the moon and as spectral, floating between sea and air. I dove and came up just in front of her. She wrapped her arms around me; at first her touch seemed like a violation, but the water and silvery light relaxed me, and as her hands moved over me, my body responded.

  We walked onto the beach and made love on an old sail lying on the sand. Afterward we lay for a long time. When I woke she was still beside me. We picked up our clothes and walked back to the house.

  This was our last night together. As we lie in bed, my skin dissolving into hers, we talked, about nothing in particular, my work and my writing, her plans, about the lovely Bay, its Cape and Campania.

  The moon had slipped to the horizon, and just visible out the window cast long shadows into the room. “See the moonlight,” she said. “It’s so soft and tender.” She paused a moment. “You know, when you try to get too close to the light it calls down a darkness.”

  “A darkness? But why?”

  “It's there, in us. Or not. I don't know. But you have to enter the darkness, to find the light. It is what I will do tomorrow, at the sibyl’s cave. I will enter the darkness and there I will find the light.” Her eyes, just visible in the night’s darkness, looked well beyond me to a world I knew nothing of.

  I tried to make sense of it. Isis, Dionysus, Cumae. It was a new world to me, one I’d never allowed myself into. But it made a kind of sense to me, now that she was beside me, a new kind of sense, a soul-sense, this darkness of the gut and the heart, which I’d felt within the moonlight reflecting off her breasts on the beach.

  In the light is a kind of darkness, I thought, drifting off to sleep, and in the darkness, light.

  I had seen and felt it, the darkness in the deep German forest. It was the darkness and the light that shone out of the well-spring the young German had died in. It was the darkness and the light of his death.

  But Caligula had been enveloped in a darkness, too, and Nero, the dark consuming madness of desire. Wasn’t that the same darkness of the rites of Dionysus and of the Eleusinian mysteries, the darkness of Egypt and the Orient? Wasn’t Rome’s civilizing influence, which I and Vespasian worked so hard for, wasn't that a struggle against the darkness I was giving in to?

  What did it mean, after all, to enter the darkness to find the light? When you thought about it, it made no sense. In light we find light; in darkness, the dark.

  How was it possible, I thought, to drink deeply at the well-springs of life -- the light or the darkness of life -- while remaining true to the lesson: All things in moderation?

  Does it mean, now and again, giving up one for the other: passion for moderation, moderation for passion?

  Her body seemed to hum next to me, to nurture my thoughts like embryonic plants in a flower full of seeds. They were just that, embryonic thoughts, just beginning to live, incomplete.

  I have come out of the darkness, I thought, remembering my mother and the birth I'd undergone into the light. I will return to the darkness, I thought, as the light passes out of my eyes, finally, some day. But between I will seek the light and not the darkness.

  I fell asleep. When I awoke the moonlight was gone, it was nearly morning, but it was still dark and she was not there.

  I remembered Horus. If I were to release the bird, I must do it now. I rose from bed and padded barefoot into the guest-room. The night was dark and the house quiet.

  I made my way carefully and quietly to the far corner of the room. My hands touched the cage but to my astonishment Horus wasn't there. I thought perhaps she’d left him on his perch. But the perch was empty too. I stood unmoving in the dark a long time, hardly believing I'd actually dared carry out my plan and now even more confused by the bird’s absence. I went back to bed, frustrated and disappointed, and fell into a kind of moody half-sleep.

  When I woke again I remembered the palimpsest of Aristotle and rose and went silently to my study, found it there and touched it, to be sure it had not all been a dream. Then I remembered this was the morning I was to take her to Cumae. I wakened a growling Lucius, then feeling somewhat lost searched out my Drusilla.

  Chapter 23

  Misenum

  Aug. 20, 79

  In the darkness we begin to see.

  Theodore Roethke

  I searched but did not find her. Instead she found me sitting in my study, one hand on a stack of pressed plants, pen in the other stuck in mid-sentence.

  “I looked for you,” I said.

  “I went down to the beach. My last time.” From behind, she rubbed my neck.

  Lucius stuck his head in the doorway. “Time to go.”

  I made my way to the bathroom. It was dark, still early. The servants were beginning to stir; I walked through their reticent and sullen early-morning mood. Plinia and Caecilius weren't up yet. I told Lucius to be sure the Liburnian was ready.

  I sat at a breakfast of a small bread, some figs and fresh apricots. Drusilla, who'd gone off to finish packing, joined me. She’d dressed for the trip in a clean tunic and though a widow, the long white married woman's stola. Her hair, done in the tall Flavian style, was gathered into a hairnet. Her arms were heavy with gold and ivory-inlaid armbands, her fingers with rings inherited from her ancestors, each worth a poor man’s ransom. She would embark on today’s spiritual journey with a clear statement of
who she was, for as she'd told me, that determined who she might become.

  “We’ve a good wind. The fall Austers are stirring,” I said. “Here, have some figs.”

  “Ah.” She accepted the offering. “When do we go?”

  “Soon as the ship's ready.”

  “I don’t look forward to it,” she confessed, “If the sea's high, I'll be sick.”

  “The road's not safe. The seas should be okay.”

  She disappeared to gather her things. I passed her in the atrium, standing among her bags. I padded off into the kitchen where I gathered some food – fruit, bread, wine, a cheese, and placed them in one of her baskets. She smiled in gratitude.

  “And Horus?” I asked.

  “Horus is...free,” she said, offhandedly.

  “Escaped, you mean?”

  She didn't answer.

  “You let him go?”

  “No.” She pulled the stem off a fig.

  “I don't understand,” he said.

  “He’s there,” she said, pointing to her basket. I lifted the cloth cover, peered in.

  “Go ahead. Look,” she said.

  Under the bread and bottle of wine was a simple muslin cloth. I lifted it and saw the body of the sea-eagle, wrapped as a mummy. Its hood now off it stared up at me, a single accusatory eye with the shine of life taken out of it. I recoiled, re-covered the bird.

  “He died?” I asked. I looked in her eyes and saw a kind of darkness.

  “Yes,” Drusilla said impatiently, stuffing a few last things into a bag. “I helped him. Now he will help me find the other realm.”

  “What do you mean, helped him?”

  Lucius appeared in the doorway. “The ship’s ready,” he announced.

  “Come on, its time to go,” she said. She picked up the basket and asked a servant to bring her bags.